Superintendent’s Report to the Board – April 14, 2015

Superintendent’s Report to the Board – April 14, 2015

1. Academic Programming

a. The annual Association for Community Education of BC conference was a remarkable success last week at Chatelech Secondary School. Keynote speakers reviewed the importance of community and communication. Workshop presenters spoke of a wide range of supports that make a significant difference to the mental, physical and social health of our students.

b. The Healthy Buddies Program was a finalist in the 2015 Cmolik Prize for the Enhancement of Public Education in BC. While not the winning entry, the district is proud of a program developed with School District No. 46 staff that is being utilized in other jurisdictions to support healthy and active living.

c. Technology

i. MyEducationBCis the student information management system that has replaced BCeSIS. A basic level of training has taken place for staff to enter attendance data and develop secondary school timetables. Further areas of exploration included using the marks system functionality, eportfolio, and communication with parents’ capacities of the system.

ii. The district will be installing Next Generation hardware next September in all schools. This hardware will significantly improve online data download capacity and spam protection.

d. The District Reading Committee has committed to a standard reading assessment that will be supported across all classrooms from kindergarten to grade 9. The Early Primary Reading Assessment (EPRA) and the District Assessment of Reading Team (DART) assessments are the supported protocols in our district. Having the same assessments helps teachers to have a common language when they work with their students and with each other to optimize instruction for reading. Indepth in-service is provided to teachers to support implementation of the EPRA and the DART.

e. The Annual Early Years Fair takes place on Saturday, May 2nd. This public event allows us to work with our community partners to share information with parents about early childhood learning and supports in our community.

2. Operational

a. District Parent Advisory Committee: Thursday, April 23rd at 7:00 p.m. in the Chatelech Secondary School library.

b. Parent-Teacher Communication Committee is developing strategies to more fully engage parents in the education of their children at the elementary and secondary levels.

c. The Joint Use Committee meets later in April to continue exploring how to best utilize the resources of the SCRD and our schools to meet the needs of the community.

Strategic Plan Report: Environmental Education: “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. ~ Chief Seattle, 1854 ~

Background:

A key value of School District No. 46 is to promote safe and healthy learning environments that are welcoming, culturally responsive and environmentally responsible.

Our community expects that schools will support and include the natural world both on the Sunshine Coast and in the global community. Consequently, our students are actively engaged in a wide range of activities to address this goal. The district Environmental Education Committee is focused on removing barriers to students accessing the outdoors and to learning more about their natural world.

Discussion:

Environmental education continues to be an important part of education on the Sunshine Coast. Teachers are integrating the natural world into their activities on a regular basis. The emerging British Columbia curriculum allows for a more project-based approach to education that can easily flex to allow for learning outside of the classroom. The district has a number of teachers whose personal professional passion for alternative learning opportunities has brought them to be leaders in this field. Teachers from across Canada have requested more information regarding the district NEST program for their own students.

Next Steps:

The district will continue to develop strategies and opportunities for students and teachers that will help them to understand their natural world. The new curriculum is a particularly exciting opportunity to clearly identify options for students learning in a project-based, environmentally themed program delivery model. The district will prepare resources to further enable teachers to interact with nature and integrate the new curriculum in